SACRAMENTO – Most of us get in trouble when we’re late. If you don’t bring back a library book on time, they fine you. Miss a court date, and count on a warrant with your name on it.

Not California’s political leaders – at least not when it comes to passing a budget. Wednesday marks the last day of the fiscal year – the day the state constitution says a budget must be in place. Yet, for the 17th time in the past 20 years, lawmakers and the governor will find themselves bickering well into the summer – and busting their deadline.

“It just becomes sort of natural,” said Tim Hodson, executive director of the Center for California Studies and a state Senate staffer in the 1980s and early 1990s. “There is psychological validity to the idea that once you break a rule, it becomes easier to break it. The world didn’t stop, so no big deal.”

How do they keep getting away with it?

Technically, there’s no penalty if a budget goes late, and lawmakers insist they need the extra time to do what’s right for the state. This time, the fight’s over a $19.1 billion deficit, and already there’s talk of pushing things all the way to Election Day in November. That’s not to say there wouldn’t be consequences. By late summer, just as it did last year, the state would run out of cash. State workers may receive minimum wage checks. Payments to universities and local governments would be delayed. There’s even the prospect of yet another round of IOUs.

So if anyone gets in trouble, it might be us.

Only two years ago, Gov. Arnold Schwarzenegger, along with legislative Democrats and Republicans, locked horns almost into autumn over a $15.3 billion deficit. The governor signed the budget Sept. 24, shattering by weeks past records for tardiness. And within months, plummeting state revenues brought everyone back to the bargaining table.

But it wasn’t always this way. In the 1960s and 1970s, and part of the ’80s, deficits came and deficits went, taxes were raised and taxes were lowered, and state budgets mostly were signed on time or just a few days late. In rare cases, budgets were signed early.

Despite having to OK a substantial tax increase, Gov. Ronald Reagan signed a budget more than a week before the deadline in 1972. Heck, the latest Reagan signed a budget was the Fourth of July, and that was in 1970.

In recent years, the only thing that seems to help is whether the state is drunk on surplus cash, proving that too much is always an easier fight than too little. Schwarzenegger, blessed by a $7.5 billion windfall in his 2006 re-election year, teamed up with Democrats to pay down the state’s debt but also lavish billions on schools. It was his only on-time budget in seven years, not counting the one in 2009 that could be considered the paradigm of dysfunction. Signed in February, it was billions out of whack by May and finally wrapped up by the end of July.

Davis, lofted by the dot-com gold rush during his first two years in office, presided over on-time budgets in 1999 and 2000 that made almost everybody happy – never mind that the good times didn’t last. Billions were poured into local projects and state highways, and hundreds of millions in tax breaks were handed out – the biggest of them a cut in the vehicle license fee.

The deal in 2000 was so jubilant the Democratic Assembly speaker and his Republican counterpart smooched one another on the cheek.

Still those years were the exceptions. The last three governors have all had budgets slip into September, slogs undreamed of in the Golden State’s more golden age. Granted, the past three years have left California with its worst economy in 70 years – with a stunning $60 billion in deficits alone last year.

But it’s clear, observers say, that something’s changed. California politicians – like their peers across the nation – have become more partisan, they say. Term limits, approved by voters, cycle in perpetually green crops of lawmakers who lack the expertise and relationships to craft budget compromises.

James R. Mills, a San Diego-area Democrat who served as leader of the state Senate from 1971-81 and in the Assembly before that, remembers a more collegial time in Sacramento, when lawmakers from both parties gathered socially and built not just working relationships but actual friendships. That’s all gone now, he said, because of term limits.

“Nobody is thinking about the problems facing the state after they’re term-limited out,” said Mills, who as an assemblyman sponsored the ballot initiative that made the Legislature a full-time job for its members. “In those days, members of both parties were primarily interested in the well-being of the people of California. Nowadays, members seem to be more interested in making the opposite party look bad.”

One thing no one can blame, despite all the hubbub lately about budget reform, is a requirement that state budgets receive two-thirds support from lawmakers. While late budgets have been on the rise in recent decades, the two-thirds threshold has been with California since the Great Depression. That said, the gridlock has gotten so bad that voters this fall will be asked whether it’s time to lower the hurdle.

That election may be the one thing that propels Sacramento to wrap up the budget this year.

“Eventually people want to go home and campaign,” said Daniel J.B. Mitchell, a UCLA professor who studies the budget. “Getting it done on paper is enough to send everybody home. We could get a deal like that.”

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